[Joe Dillard]

I've been helping do some work on a couple LJ's lately where the folks wanted their shocks outboarded.

Doing this modification in the manner I'm being trained-up to do it, requires cutting the front upper shock mount ~80% off, the front lower shock mount gets completely cut off, and we integrate Poly Performance towers into the system.

For the rear, Poly towers are frenched into the frame and Poly lowers replace the stock stuff.

We also remove the upper coil buckets from the frame, and re-position them so that the upper buckets are basically level to the ground. This improves suspension cycling and when set-up correctly as a system with the towers and longer shocks, allows for better suspension dynamics,

Here's a couple pics from a Jeep we did last week. Sorry that these angles of the pics are not the greatest.










Here's another Jeep we did this past week. Sorry for the low quality cell phone pics - I forgot to bring my digital camera with me the day I took these.

The front axle is a Currie HP44. The Jeep is an LJ. IIRC, the front shocks are ~11 stroke Fox 2.0's w/reservoir. About 80% of the original tower was removed. The Poly tower piggybacks on the remainder of the original tower. Fenders are Metalcloak that we had to trim to make enough room for the towers.

Front driver side:





Here's what we were working on yesterday. The rear axle is an geared/ARB'd Currie D44.

We removed the fuel tank, removed all the body bolts & raised the rear of the tub off the frame ~6" so that we could grind off the upper coil buckets & re-position them. Plasma'd the lower shock mounts off & ground the axle tubes smooth. Removed the axles, brakes etc because we are flipping the left & right side so that the ebrake system works better. Removed an old screwed up trackbar bracket then drilled & remounted a new Currie rear trackbar mount that swings it forward to give it better clearance. Sliced/frenched the frame for the rear tower and prepped it for welding. Drilled and tapped holes for new rear lower coil retainers.

After some prompting from Blaine, Frank Currie was nice enough to provide a set of prototype coils for testing on this LJ Jeep. After we finished the front, I took it for a test drive. It drove fantastic.

The new shocks are Fox 2.0 resi's that are ~31" eye to eye, so we cycled the suspension a few times to give us the compressed & droop measurements we needed for when the lowers & towers got welded in.

As you can see - the shocks are not vertical, yet they are about as good as you can get with a coil system and other parameters we were working with.

Coil bucket repositioned. This is NOT my favorite thing to do. Its a bugger getting a grinder inside the framerails to grind the buckets off.



Bucket and tower welded in. BTW - we needed to use the taller poly towers in this application. The shorter ones are ~1/2" too short. What this means is extra cutting of the lower portion of the towers so that you don't have a huge tower hanging off the bottom of the frame which would look dorky.





To get a good clean "outboard" fit - we trimmed the inside edge of the lower control arm mount, then positioned it & burned it in.







Passenger side upper coil bucket repositioned:






Looking from under the tub.....driver side tower frenched & welded in:





The LJ we were working on:



Here's a couple pics of how the fronts turned out:

[Jim B]

Nice upgrade.

You mentioned you cycled up and down... what I'm thinking is that when suspension really starts to move with the short arms it might cause a bit of stress even though there is beefed up brackets. Are the arms now parallel or are there plans to make them longer

[Joe Dillard]

Hi Jim, yea, we cycled the suspension a few times to check for max droop and max bump since we were using a new set of prototype coils and new poly bump stops.

Once we cycled it to max bump on the drivers side, we noticed that his ARB diff cover (where the ARB is forged into the cover) was contacting the Currie trackbar prematurely (prior to full bump). So we ground some of the "B" off of the ARB. On the same token, one of the Currie top diff ribs was contacting the upper drivers side control arm prior to full bump, so we clearanced it too.

Once we got those measurements figured out, we could position the lower Poly mount and the Poly tower.

This rig is staying with short arms. The fronts now have ~11" of suspension travel and the rear ~10". This leaves a margine of ~1" so that the shocks don't top or bottom out.

We added a rear Antirock as well, which gave us some challenges of its own.

[Jim B]

That's some nice travel

My concern with the out boarding of the shocks was not the travel but the back and forth stress, looks exceptional thought.

Keep us updated when it gets into the soup.